Overview of Windows 8 Unleashed Event held in Seattle

If you do development in Visual Studio or even JavaScript, you should check out what is coming for developing in Windows 8. I was impressed with what I saw at the Windows 8 Unleashed event held at Microsoft in Seattle. They highlighted a few key new features available for developing apps to run in Windows 8. The things that jumped out were the ubiquitous nature of apps now. Content and states of applications can follow you as you go from machine to machine. So if you play a game on your phone and then go to your laptop, you score will follow you. I’m not talking about a website, I’m talking about a local app. This data sharing occurs via your Windows Live account or Skydrive.

They showed how to manage the dynamic icons on the new desktop and how apps can receive updated information even when not running.

If you plan to monetize your apps, the store model has changed dramatically. Microsoft is predicting 400 million new computers will be purchased in the next year and 65% will use windows OS. That equates to 260 million computers. This will create a huge market for apps. Microsoft intends to take advantage of this opportunity by working hard to promote the apps and to extend the advertising done via apps. A handy little promotional feature is that you can share an app with your friends. That works similar to sharing apps on facebook.

Microsoft wants your apps to sell because they are going to take 30% of your revenue up to the first $25,000 in sales, then 20% of all sales above that.

Those are just a few highlights. They presented much more information than I covered and had labs to test it out, but rather than repeat it all here, I will guide you to visit their website where you can find all of the resources that they used in the workshop.

One of the best things I got from the resources were the links to setup a VM and a demo version of Windows 8 to play with.